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By Sharon Tregaskis

Samina
Raja was a newly minted civil engineer and urban planner
in the summer of 1999 when Kashmir was wracked with an armed
conflict that had been simmering since her youth. Despite the
violence, she had steady work, reviewing plans for giant hotels and
high-end interior renovations. But increasingly, she felt torn.
“It just didn’t make moral sense,” she says.
“I was using my civil engineering and planning skills for the
wrong projects.”

Envisioning a post-conflict future in which she could put those
skills to work promoting equity and justice in her homeland, Raja
immigrated to the United States to earn a PhD in urban and regional
planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (she had already
earned a master’s in the field in New Delhi). Over the next
three years, she dug into the quantitative and methodological tools
planners use to make their case, as she and her adviser, economist
Jack Huddleston, scrutinized the strengths and shortcomings
of traditional fiscal impact analysis—the strategy planners
utilize to assess whether a community might benefit more from a
casino or a used-car lot, a supermarket or a children’s
playground.

At the same time, she was becoming increasingly immersed in the
ideas of UW urban planning professor Jerome Kaufman, who was then
in the process of coaxing into being the nascent field of food
systems planning. From Kaufman, Raja learned to see how the web of
food producers, distributors, processors and consumers together
compose a local food system and sustain a community, and how the
design and planning of cities impact that process. Off campus, Raja
was getting her hands dirty at a community garden that made fresh
produce affordable, even as members struggled to attract the
support of local legislators. “Talking with Jack and Jerry, I
recognized that this community garden that mattered a great deal to
me really didn’t matter to planners,” says Raja.
“It wasn’t considered the highest and best use of
land.”

Two decades later, Raja, an associate professor in UB’s
School of Architecture and Planning, stands atop an intellectual
empire that puts community priorities for local food systems front
and center in the work of urban planners. Hired in 2002 to teach
research methods at the school, she also founded UB’s Food
Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab (the Food
Lab), which now comprises a mix of undergraduate and graduate
students, as well as two full-time research associates. Much of
their work extends the vision laid out by Raja, Kaufman and
colleagues in “A
Planners Guide to Community and Regional Food Planning,”
a research monograph published in 2008 by the American Planning
Association that champions planners’ involvement in food
systems and proposes specific roles for their participation.

“In its broadest conception, planning is about bringing
information or knowledge to bear on problems people face in
communities,” says Raja, who also holds an adjunct
appointment in the School of Public Health and Health Professions.
“Planners pride themselves on making places work for people;
they think about housing, the environment, jobs.”

Meanwhile, she says, food systems have gotten short shrift.
Consider, for example, the tenuous leases held by community
gardens, the zoning and permitting challenges faced by
neighborhoods organizing a farmers market, and the regulatory
headaches that impede food truck owners whose menus could boost
options in an underserved neighborhood. It’s a stark contrast
to the relative ease with which a corporate supermarket lumbers
through bureaucratic requirements to attract tax deferments and
other development incentives, even though such
micro-entrepreneurial businesses as food trucks and farmers markets
actually keep more dollars circulating locally. “It makes
economic sense for planners to understand food systems,” she
says.

Digging in

For Raja, however, food systems planning extends well beyond
economic considerations. Central to her expansive vision is a
pursuit of equity and social justice for the people who have long
been disenfranchised by traditional planning—the poor, people
of color, immigrants and refugees.

This ethos shines through her long-running partnership with
the Massachusetts Avenue
Project(MAP), a nonprofit on Buffalo’s West Side. The
neighborhood was flecked with vacant lots and abandoned houses when
residents founded MAP in 1992 to develop safe spaces for their kids
to play. They built a playground, then opened a neighborhood
center. In 1998, they started a garden on two lots across the
street from the neighborhood center, which quickly expanded to
become Buffalo’s first urban farm.

Local teens plan and work the farm—a patchwork of more
than a dozen vacant lots, all within walking distance of one
another—and much of their harvest is consumed by families in
the community. Buoyed by the farm’s popularity, MAP hosted a
round of public meetings in 2002 to collect input on how to extend
its programs in urban agriculture to combat the racial and economic
injustice at the heart of the neighborhood’s troubles. Raja
was among those who showed up to learn more.

Photo: MAP

Since then, Raja and her team in the Food Lab have devoted
thousands of hours to documenting and analyzing MAP’s local
impact, revealing the effect of MAP participation on kids’
consumption of vegetables, challenging the USDA’s
characterization of the West Side as a food desert and
investigating how the large number of immigrants who’ve
settled in the area affects the local food system.

“Samina hears, understands and respects the perspectives
of people who have experienced the greatest injustices that the
food system can deliver,” says Center for Resilient Cities
Executive Director Marcia Caton Campbell, who advised Raja’s
first food system assessment at UW. “She sees all the
different sectors, the key nodes and linkages, and she’s very
interested in the people who are on the ground. She is interested
in making sure that those people get their due—not from a
top-down perspective, but from the perspective of the people
themselves.”

Raja’s first official collaboration with MAP was a 2003
planning practicum conceived with the organization’s
executive director, Diane Picard. The 6-credit course was one of
three studio options UB students could take to fulfill requirements
for the master of urban planning program. Eleven students dug into
the assignment to assess food security on the West Side and
identify opportunities to improve the situation, with Raja and
Picard as their co-advisers. In 2005, the American Institute of
Certified Planners honored the course for its pedagogical merits.
Picard still references the 150-page compendium that resulted from
the students’ research (“Food
for Growth: A Community Food System Plan for Buffalo’s West
Side”), illustrated with artwork by children from the
community. “It gave us data to bring to politicians,
policymakers and funders, to show there was an issue in our
neighborhood,” she says.

In the nearly 15 years since Raja’s students completed
“Food for Growth,” MAP has added a mobile farmers
market with six sites in underserved Buffalo neighborhoods,
launched beekeeping and aquaculture programs, and developed an
array of programs for teens. The latter include horticultural
training on the MAP farm site; business-development experience
creating value-added products, like salsa and salad dressing; and
even college-readiness opportunities, such as mentorship and
college visits. In 2015, MAP harvested more than 18,000 pounds of
vegetables, started a second youth garden, purchased four more
vacant lots, and employed and trained 50 young people in urban
agriculture.

Meanwhile, Raja has continued to identify opportunities to
support MAP, as well as a handful of other Buffalo-area nonprofits
pursuing similar goals. She tailors grant applications to answer
questions they have, features them as case studies in her planning
studios and gives Food Lab researchers their data to analyze.
Often, the work has mutual benefits. In 2014, Raja and Picard
co-authored “Rustbelt
Radicalism,” a case study for the Journal of Agriculture,
Food Systems, and Community Development (JAFSCD) that details how
MAP successfully influenced local planners and lawmakers, leading
to transformations in municipal policy and planning for
strengthening food systems.

Ties that bind

MAP stands out in a growing field of grassroots organizations
across the United States focused on transforming urban and rural
food systems. In 2012, to foster communication among these groups
and build on their successes, Raja established Growing Food
Connections (GFC), an ambitious project subsequently
dedicated to the intellectual legacy of her mentor, Jerry Kaufman,
who passed away in 2013. His photo now sits on Raja’s desk in
her Hayes Hall office.

Funded with a $3.96 million grant from the USDA’s National
Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the five-year
effort—led by Raja—is a partnership among the Food Lab,
the American Farmland Trust, the American Planning Association, the
international consulting firm Cultivating Healthy Places and Ohio
State University. The group’s highest profile project is a
collaboration with eight “communities of opportunity,”
municipalities and counties around the country that have invited
the GFC team to help them bridge the gap between food production
and food security through public policy.

Additional GFC projects include documenting innovative food
system policies in vulnerable urban and rural communities and
creating an array of online resources, such as a massive,
searchable policy database and a series of planning briefs, as well
as social networking and continuing education for activists and
elected officials. “GFC is going to have lasting
impacts,” says Duncan Hilchey, editor-in-chief of JAFSCD and
co-coordinator of Cornell University’s Lyson Center for Civic
Agriculture and Food Systems. “I don’t know how many
dozens of food systems professionals and activists I’ve
referred to GFC’s database. It’s really amazing. You
want an example of a municipal ordinance dealing with the
regulation of bees? It’s just a couple of keystrokes, and
presto! It’s such a gold mine for planners and
policymakers.”

As with her partnership with MAP, Raja has invited UB students
to take leading roles in GFC, collecting and analyzing data, and
building relationships with project partners. While some seek her
out because of a shared interest, the professor also actively
recruits from the ranks of undergraduate- and graduate-level
students in her classes. “I absolutely love it,” says
Raja, who weaves data analytics into her coursework. “When we
don’t teach students about those methods, they can argue all
they like from a place of value and passion, but they can’t
bring to bear evidence to guide their answer.”

Photo: MAP

By the numbers

An alumnus of the UB program, Derek Nichols (MUP ’10, BA
’07) was already a bit of a data junkie when he enrolled in
Raja’s statistics class. “It was one of the hardest
courses I’ve ever taken,” he says. “And it was so
fulfilling.” Nichols went on to work with Raja on multiple
courses, co-authoring a report with fellow students on
opportunities for Buffalo to bolster its support for the local food
system. The Green Code, a historic overhaul of Buffalo’s
land-use plan adopted in 2016, reflects many of the students’
recommendations, including bureaucratic and zoning supports to
promote urban farmers, community gardeners, food truck owners and
other participants in the local food economy.

Now director of education and outreach for Grassroots Gardens
WNY, a nonprofit organization that supports the operations of
more than 100 community gardens scattered throughout Buffalo,
Nichols still partners with Raja to produce the analyses that
exceed what he and the organization’s executive director can
produce alone.

In 2013, for example, Grassroots Gardens partnered with the Food
Lab to conduct the Buffalo
Neighborhood Food Project, a USDA/NIFA-funded collaboration to
enhance the city’s food system. “[The Food Lab] did all
of our data collection and processing,” says Nichols.
“We found out our gardens grew 30,000 pounds of food and 75
percent of our school gardens are in food deserts. We’ll use
that data for future grant applications.”

Among Raja’s more recent recruits, doctoral candidate
Subhashni Raj (MUP ’13) came to the United States in the fall
of 2011 as a Fulbright scholar from Fiji. A seasoned climate
activist and organizer, Raj had a limited social network in the
early months of her tenure at UB and was fast accruing more time on
her hands than she knew what to do with. Then she heard
Raja’s Food Lab pitch. “I don’t know anything
about food planning,” she told Raja. “I’m
interested in climate change. But I’m interested in research
and I’ll work for free.”

Like Raja, Raj had come to the United States to build the
quantitative and methodological skills she would need to make a
difference back home, where climate-change impacts are devastating.
Raja didn’t quibble over Raj’s passions and instead
handed her a dataset, documenting the effects of MAP’s
Growing Green youth programming before and after participation. The
resulting article, “Beneficial
but Constrained: Role of Urban Agriculture Programs in Supporting
Healthy Eating Among Youth,” was published last year in
the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition. “I
worked on the food research,” says Raj, “but I also
cultivated my own interest, how I could use food as a lens for my
climate-change research. It couldn’t have been a better
fit.”

Raj continued to work with the Food Lab after earning her
master’s in May 2013, and the following month she was
selected from a national pool to become UB’s
inaugural Jerome
L. Kaufman Doctoral Fellow. In the Spring 2017 semester she
taught a graduate-level course on food systems planning; in April,
some of her students pitched in to help a local coalition
formulating a campaign aimed at transforming how public
institutions purchase food. “Our community is the most
important thing,” says Raj, sounding very much like her
mentor. “They ask the questions, we facilitate finding the
answers. We exist because the community has a need.”

Beyond Buffalo

Haakh, a traditional Kashmiri cooking green. Photo: MAP

Even as she has devoted a laser-like focus to food systems in
the greater Buffalo area, Kashmir native Samina Raja has maintained
a global perspective. She’s a member of the guideline
development group on Health and Housing for the World Health
Organization’s Public Health and Environment Department and
has also served on an expert group for the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization, promoting the integration of food systems
into urban planning worldwide. On Oct. 16, 2016—World Food
Day—Raja and the UB Food Lab team led a training session in
Ecuador as part of a U.N. conference to ratify the New Urban
Agenda, which sets global standards of achievement in sustainable
urban development.

In 2015, UB named Raja a co-leader of its Community of
Excellence in Global Health Equity(CGHE), part of a $25 million
initiative to connect faculty across disciplines to solve pressing
societal issues through research, education and engagement. One
pilot project on food equity in the Global South brings Raja full
circle: Her team, led by Alex Judelsohn (MA ’16), is studying
how urbanization, climate change and global commerce are affecting
the cultivation and consumption of haakh, a collard green that is a
staple of traditional Kashmiri cooking.

.........................
Beginning farmer Sharon Tregaskis covers the worlds of health care
and agriculture from her home in the Finger Lakes.